Sometime after the fall of Rome, we come to the
Dark Ages.
Most of Europe
was decentralized, rural, parochial. Life was reduced to the
“laws
of nature:” The powerful ruled, while the powerless looked only to
survive.
There was no sense of history or progress. Superstition and
fatalism prevailed. Belief in the imminent end of the world was
common
every century. You can get a fair approximation to European life
in dark and early middle ages by looking at some of the developing
nations
of the world, although you would have to take away all signs of
the
past thousand years of technological development!

Alcuin (735-804) -- Charlemagne’s head scholar -- is one of
the
few names that come down to us from this period. Other than his
Christianity,
a glimmer of his view of reality can be gleaned from this quote:
“What is man? The slave of death, a passing wayfarer. How
is
man placed? Like a lantern in the wind.”

Nevertheless, Charlemagne (768-814) provided a political
unity in the form of the Frankish Empire,
and the Pope a religious unity, and a new era slowly began.
Eventually,
the Church took over Europe, and the Pope replaced the emperor as the
most
important figure. By 1200, the Church would own a third of the land
area
of Europe! The power of the church and its common creed meant
enormous
pressures to conform, backed up by fear of supernatural
sanctions.
But on the positive side, the papacy helped establish stability and
ultimately
prosperity.

We now turn to what are called the Middle Ages, roughly the period
from 1000 to 1400 ad.

The Universities

Universities developed out of monastery and cathedral schools --
really
what we would call elementary schools, but attended by adolescents and
taught by monks and priests. The first was in Bologna,
established
in 1088 (see map below).

In these schools and universities, students began (with the
always-present
threat of flogging!) with the trivium -- grammar (the art of
reading
and writing, focussing on the psalms, other parts of the Bible, and the
Latin classics), rhetoric (what we would call speech), and logic.
Trivium, of course, is the origin of the word trivia -- the stuff
beginners
deal with!

Beyond that, they would study the quadrivium:
arithmetic,
geometry, music, and astronomy. All together, these subjects make
up the seven liberal arts. Liberal referred to the free
man,
the man of some property, and liberal arts were in contrast to the
practical
arts of the working poor.

The problem of universals

The major philosophical issue of the time was the nature of
universals.
This concerns the meaning of a word. What in the real world does
a word refer to? This is easy with proper nouns (names): George, for
example,
refers to this person here, me myself. But what about other, more
general words? What does cat refer to? This was by no means
a new issue, but the scholars of the middle ages began without the
benefit
of nice Greek sources!

St.
Anselm of Canterbury(1033-1109) was a neoPlatonist, and
he
is best known for his efforts at coming up with a logical proof of
God’s
existence -- the famous ontological proof: Since we can think of
a perfect being, he must exist, since perfection implies existence.

In regards to the question of universals, he was a proponent of realism.
This is not to be confused with the modern sense of realism as being in
touch with reality.
Realism was Plato’s perspective: There is a real universal or
ideal
(somewhere) to which a word refers. This usually fits in well
with
Christianity. If humanity is real beyond being just the
collection
of individual human beings, we can talk about a human nature,
including,
for example, the idea of original sin. If there were no such
thing
as humanity, if each person were a law unto him or herself, then we
could
hardly lay the sins of Adam and Eve on anyone but Adam and Eve!

Likewise, if God is a real universal, then there is no logical
incongruity
about saying he is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit all at once.

Mind you, the argument isn’t without problems. For example,
the
ultimate universal -- All -- is then logically greater than God,
because
All must include God and creation! But Christianity says that God
and creation are separate and fundamentally different.

Anselm’s motto was Augustine’s “I believe in order that I may
understand” (credo ut intelligam): Faith is an absolute
requirement,
and is the standard for all thinking. Truth is revealed by God,
so
submit yourself to the church.

Nominalism

Roscellinus of Amorica in Brittany (1050-1121) was the
founder
of nominalism, another
approach to universals. A universal, he
said,
is just a “flatus vocis” (a vocal sound -- i.e. a word). Only
individuals
actually exist. Words, and the ideas they represent, refer to
nothing. This is quite compatable with materialism and
empiricism,
but not, really, to Christianity.

It, too, is not without problems: If words are nothing but
air,
then reason (and philosophy), which is the manipulation of these words,
is nothing but blowing air (as many students in fact believe). That
includes,
of course, the reasoning it took to come to the nominalist conclusion!

Regarding the church, nominalism means that the church is
nothing
but the people that compose it, and religion is just what individuals
think.
And, if God is Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, then we can't be
monotheists.

Abelard

Peter Abelard (1079-1142) was a student of both Anselm and
Roscillinus.
A brilliant thinker and speaker and a canon (priest) of the Cathedral
of Notre
Dame,
he became a popular teacher at the University of Paris.

In 1117, he (now 38) met a sixteen year old girl named
Heloise. An
orphan,
she was being raised by her uncle Fulbert. She was particularly
intelligent,
as well as beautiful, and so her uncle asked Abelard if he would tutor
her in exchange for room and board. Abelard himself commented
that
this was like entrusting a lamb to a wolf!

His teaching suffered a bit. He was more
likely to compose
love
poems than lectures! But Heloise became pregnant and had a son
they
named Astrolabe (after an instrument for measuring the position of the
stars!). Her uncle was furious, but Abelard promised
to marry Heloise, if Fulbert would keep the marriage a secret.
The
only way he could become a priest while married would be for her to
become
a nun, which was unacceptable to either of them. She was willing
to be his mistress, but he convinced her to marry him in secret.

Well, Uncle Fulbert remained upset by all this, and eventually sent
some
men
to teach Abelard a lesson: They cut off his genitals! The
people
of Paris (being French, even in the Middle Ages) had complete sympathy
with their hero Abelard, but Abelard himself was mortified.
Heloise
became a nun, and Abelard a monk in order to pay for their sins. They
exchanged
letters for many years, and her first to him can be seen by clicking
here.

Abelard was, however, persuaded to continue teaching and
writing.
Arguing, among other things, that the trinity referred not to the
Father,
Son, and Holy Spirit, but to God’s power, wisdom, and love, he began
to
irritate some of the people with power in the church. The Pope issued
an
order condemning Abelard to perpetual silence and confinement to a
monastery
(the usual for heresy at this time). On his way to Rome to defend
himself, he died at 63. Heloise convinced his Abbot to bury him
at
her convent, and twelve years later, she died and was buried next to
him.

Abelard invented “sic et non” -- yes and no, pros and cons -- in a
book
by the same name. "Sic et non" is a Socratic method that lays the
arguments
of two opposing points of view side by side for comparison.
Abelard
is very much the rationalist, and he made his motto “I understand in
order
to believe” (intelligo ut credam). He believed that the truth of
faith and reason must still agree, as did all his teachers, but reason
has precedence. It is faith that has to adapt, i.e. the church
must
re-evaluate the meaning of its teachings when they fail to measure up
to
reason.

For Abelard, ethics is a matter of conduct inspired by a good heart,
good will, good intentions. If you have a good conscience, you
can
do no wrong (sin). You can only be mistaken. He had said, for
example,
that when Romans killed Christians (including Christ himself), they
were
only acting according to their conscience, and therefore were not
guilty
of sin!

He is best know, however, for conceptualism, his attempt to
synthesize
nominalism and realism. Although the thing and its name have a
reality
of their own, universals exist in the mind as ideas, he said, which
refer
to groups of things and are represented by words. The mind creates
abstractions
out of real things by detecting similarities, so the meaning of the
word
cat is the mental abstraction we created by looking at individual cats
and noting that they all have four legs, fur, pointy ears, two eyes
with
funny pupils, meouw, etc. etc. This is still an important
perspective
in modern cognitive psychology.

This answer to the question of universals is, as you might have
guessed
by now, still not without problems. Notice that we are assuming
that
we can use words like legs, ears, eyes.... But what do they
refer
to?
They can only refer to the mental abstractions we make of individual
legs,
ears, eyes.... So how do you tell you are looking at a leg?
Well, it's a mental abstraction we make out of flesh with a hip joint,
a knee, and a foot at the end. So what is a knee? Well,
it's....
At what point do we reach a unique thing?

[Personally, I believe that these abstractions or characteristics
are
based on errors, that is, when individual things are easily mistaken
for
each other!]

The Moslems

The Near-Eastern and North African remnants of the Roman Empire fell
as far as any other parts. Mohammed (570-632) brought Islam --
"Surrender"
-- into the world, and it spread like wildfire, both by sword and by
persuasion.
So, with Islam and reunification under a series of Arab caliphates, the
dark of the dark ages lifted a bit earlier there. In Baghdad,
Damascus,
Cairo, even Seville in newly-conquered Spain, scholars turned to the
ancient
Greeks and began again to reason and observe. The security,
stability,
wealth, and relative tolerance of their society inspired them to
produce
literature, including philosophy, that by the millenium, nearly
equalled that
of ancient Greece.

Avicenna of Baghdad (Ibn Sina, 980-1037)
was one of these
great
thinkers. Thoroughly familiar with Aristotle, he was
none-the-less
a neo-Platonist and a gnostic, as it seems all Moslem philosophers must
be in order to remain Moslem. Generally, he felt that reason and
faith could not conflict, as the Christian thinkers had concluded as
well.
But he hints at heresy by suggesting that such items of faith as the
physical
paradise after death that Mohammed promised his followers, were
necessary
in order to win over the masses, but are just stories to the mature
believer.

Averroes of Cordova (Ibn
Rushd, 1126-1198) is the greatest of
the Islamic philosophers. He began as a lawyer, and was chief
justice
of Seville and later of Cordova. He was also a physician, and
served
as the court physician in Marrakesh. He was the first to recognize that
if a person survived smallpox, they would be immune thereafter.
He
described for the first time the purpose of the retina. He wrote
an encyclopedia of medicine used in both Moslem and Christian
universities.

Averroes begins, of course, with God. God is what sustains
reality.
God is the order of the universe. But, he says, creation is just
a myth. The universe has always existed, and will always exist.

The human mind has two aspects. There is a passive intellect,
which is composed of the potential for thought and carries the details
that make one personality different from another, both physically and
psychologically.
It is a part of the body and dies with it. And there is an active
intellect, which energizes the passive intellect. It is actually
the same in each person, is the only part of us that survives death,
and
is, in fact, God.

But Islam’s openness to philosophy was not to last. The Emir
of
Baghdad ordered Averroes’ books burned, and his example was followed by
other leaders all the way back to Averroes’ homeland of Spain.
The
world of Islam had achieved what the Christian world failed to
achieve:
complete domination by religion.

By means of Moslem Spain and Sicily, Avicenna and Averroes and
others
would come to inspire, in turn, the Christian scholars of the new
universities
of Europe. These scholars would consume the writings of Greek,
Jewish, and Arabic scholars.

St. Thomas

In the late Middle Ages (the 1200s), Aristotle excited a lot of
thought
in the monks and scholars of the universities. These
neo-Aristotelians
were called schoolmen, or scholastics. By studying
Aristotle
and his Arab and Jewish commentators, they learned to think more
logically, but
their goals were still essentialy theological.

The scholastic par excellence was St. Thomas Aquinas (1225 - 1274).

Of German stock, he was the son of the Count of Aquino, a town
between
Rome and Naples. He went to the University of Naples, where there
was great interest in Arab and Jewish philosophers -- and, of course,
Aristotle.
He became a monk of the Dominican order and went to Paris to study.

His mother was so upset by this turn of events that she sent his
brothers
to kidnap him and bring him home. (Contrary to what we might
assume,
families were seldom happy when sons or daughters went off to become
monks
or nuns. They often grieved for them as if they had died!)
He escaped and continued his studies in Paris and elsewhere.

He was known to be a very pious and modest man, with no ambitions
for
church promotions -- unlike the ambitious Abelard! He wrote a
great
deal, but is best known for the Summa Theologiae, usually just
called
the Summa, a work of 21 volumes in which he uses Abelard's Sic et Non
method
to reconcile Aristotle and Christianity.

Thomas believed that the soul is the form of the body, as Aristotle
said, and gives it life and energy. But the soul and the body are
totally linked together. This flies in the face of the Platonic
and
neo-Platonic ideas of the church fathers, and irritated the mystical
Franciscan
monks most of all.

Thomas added that the soul without the body would have no
personality,
because individuality comes from matter, not spirit, which represents
the
universal in us. For this reason, resurrection of the body is
crucial
to the idea of personal immortality. Averroes’ idea that only an
impersonal soul survives death was, in other words, quite wrong.

Thomas saw five faculties of the soul:

1. The vegetative faculty, which is involved in food,
drink, sex, and growth.
2. The sensitive faculty, i.e. our senses, plus the common sense
that binds sensations together.
3. The locomotor faculty, which permits movement.
4. The appetitive faculty, which consists of our desire and will.
5. The intellectual faculty, i.e. thought, reason.

For St. Thomas, reason or intellect is man’s greatest treasure, that
which
raises him above the animals. In keeping with conceptualism, he felt it
was the intellect that abstracts the idea (form or universal) from its
individual appearance, so that, even though day-to-day experience can
tell
us about the particulars of reality, only reason or intellect can lead
us to universal laws of the physical, or the human, world.

Ultimately, we do need direct, intuitive knowledge of God. Reason
depends
on sensory experience, and sensory experience is of matter, not
spirit.
So reason, like all things human, is imperfect, and cannot comprehend
the
perfection that is God. Faith is our ultimate refuge.
Nevertheless,
he insisted, faith and reason do not conflict, since God would not have
made a world that did not ultimately match up with revealed truth.

In spite of his obvious brilliance, St. Thomas (like all
philosophers
in all ages) was a man of his time. For example, he was as
chauvinistic
as any of his predecessors regarding women: He considered women
inferior
by nature (and God’s design), and saw them as a serious threat to the
moral
progress of men. He also devoted a significant portion of the
Summa
to angels and demons, which he thought of as every bit as real as
anything
else. Among other things, he believed that the angels moved the
planets,
that they had no bodies, that they moved instantaneously, and that each
person had his or her very own guardian angel.

His ideas threatened many in the church, most especially the
Franciscans.
His works emphasized reason too much and faith too little. He put
too much stock in pagans like Aristotle and Averroes. And he
taught
that the soul and the body were unified! After his death (at the
age of 49), the Franciscans convinced the Pope to condemn him and his
writings.
But the Dominicans rallied to his defense, and in 1323 Thomas was
canonized.

(In 1879, Pope Leo XIII made Thomism the official philosophy
of the Catholic church. It is, with Marxism, positivism, and
existentialism,
one of the four most influential philosophies of the 20th century).

The Beginning of the End of the Middle Ages

The Franciscans, as I said, were the primary critics of St Thomas. Roger
Bacon (1214-1294), a Franciscan monk and scientist, pointed out
that
reason does actually need experience in order to have something to
reason
about -- a hint of modern empiricism in the Middle Ages!

But St. Thomas’ severest critic was John Duns Scotus
(1265-1308),
a Franciscan monk and professor at Oxford, Paris, and Cologne. He
believed that the authority of the church was everything. The
will
is supreme and intellect is subordinate to it. Although a conceptualist
(like Thomas), of the thing, the idea, and the name, he felt that it
was
the individual thing that was the most real. His student William
would take that and run with it.

William of Occam in England
(1280-1347) was another
Franciscan
monk. Like Roger Bacon, he believed that, without sensory contact with
things, the universal is inconceivable. In fact, he said universals are
only names we give groups of things -- a return to the nominalism of
Roscellinus.

William is best known for the principle that is named for him: Occam’s
razor. “Don’t multiply causes unnecessarily.” usually interpreted
to
mean that the simplest explanation is the best. Over time, this
came
to mean “if you don’t need a supernatural explanation, don’t use it!”

The result of William's thinking is skepticism: Without
universals,
there are no generalizations, categories, classifications, theories,
laws
of nature, etc. All we can have is an accumulation of facts about
individual entities. We will see this again in the philosophy of David
Hume.

William of Occam, although he was a devout Christian, is often
considered
the turning point from the religious worldview of the Middle Ages to
the
scientific worldview of the Renaissance and the Modern era.

You could say that philosophy rested a while around this time, not
for
a lack of ideas, but because of over a hundred years of Troubles.
There was a great famine in Europe from 1315 to 1317. The economy
spiralled downward and the banks collapsed in the first few
decades
of the 1300s. The Hundred Years War began in 1337 and lasted about 120
years (despite the name). The Black Death, a plague carried by
the
fleas on rats, came from the Near East and killed over one third of the
population between 1347 and 1352. Peasant revolts in England,
France,
and elsewhere were cruelly suppressed between 1378 and 1382.
The Church was split between two popes, one in Rome and one in Avignon,
between 1378 and 1417.

But these events, horrible as they were, turned out to be temporary
setbacks, and an even greater explosion of intellectual activity was
about to begin!